I agree with the overall statement that the Bulletin should not have published this article as it is and definitely should have not tweeted what it did. Yes, they owe you an apology but I also don’t understand some of the claims in this letter and think that these (maybe?) exaggerated claims undermine your good arguments and the rightful question for an apology.
First, concerning this paragraph:
I also have concerns about the nature of Torres’ background work for article — they seemingly sent every person that was acknowledged for the book a misleading email, telling them that we lied in the acknowledgements, and making some reviewers quite uncomfortable.
Where does this information come from? The twitter thread you link to does not claim that Torres’ made the author of the thread uncomfortable, only that he choose to ignore the email. Furthermore, the mail Torres wrote to him does not claim that you lied in the acknowledgments.
Second, the Bulletin did add an annotation to the article, correcting the claim from Torres that several researchers were not consulted. Yes, the article still suggests heavily that they weren’t and even with this annotation you get the impression that MacAskill was at least negligent in his research, but accusing the Bulletin of just lying regarding this, is also not true.
On your first question, several people Torres contacted reached out to us to tell us that they had a weird email from Torres, which made some of them uncomfortable. In some of the emails Torres repeated the false claim that we had essentially fabricated the acknowledgements.
Second, they annotated the article, but then tweeted the false claim! The claim should not be allowed to stay in the piece once they have checked it and found out that it is false. It’s basic journalism. If they think we lied to them about consulting the experts, then they should say so explicitly. If they think the claim is false it is obvious that they should remove since it is an accusation of research misconduct.
I agree with the overall statement that the Bulletin should not have published this article as it is and definitely should have not tweeted what it did. Yes, they owe you an apology but I also don’t understand some of the claims in this letter and think that these (maybe?) exaggerated claims undermine your good arguments and the rightful question for an apology.
First, concerning this paragraph:
Where does this information come from? The twitter thread you link to does not claim that Torres’ made the author of the thread uncomfortable, only that he choose to ignore the email. Furthermore, the mail Torres wrote to him does not claim that you lied in the acknowledgments.
Second, the Bulletin did add an annotation to the article, correcting the claim from Torres that several researchers were not consulted. Yes, the article still suggests heavily that they weren’t and even with this annotation you get the impression that MacAskill was at least negligent in his research, but accusing the Bulletin of just lying regarding this, is also not true.
On your first question, several people Torres contacted reached out to us to tell us that they had a weird email from Torres, which made some of them uncomfortable. In some of the emails Torres repeated the false claim that we had essentially fabricated the acknowledgements.
Second, they annotated the article, but then tweeted the false claim! The claim should not be allowed to stay in the piece once they have checked it and found out that it is false. It’s basic journalism. If they think we lied to them about consulting the experts, then they should say so explicitly. If they think the claim is false it is obvious that they should remove since it is an accusation of research misconduct.